Demobit 2017 Combined Demo Competition

DemosceneDemo, Party, Review12 February 2017

The previous edition of Demobit party took place in 2001. 16 years later, its organisers have decided to resurrect it and once again invited sceners to Bratislava. Let’s take a closer look at new demos released at this Slovakian party.

#1 – Esocentrica by Andromeda Software Development and Satori

Do not adjust your screen, your graphics card works just fine. Even if you will see lots of strange glitches, patterns and colours, that’s how it intended to look like.

An interesting cooperation between ASD and Satori, where Navis provided his GPU routines, and Zden took care of processing visuals on the CPU side. This is Navis’ first demo in 2017 (he releases at least one a year). Zden is very productive too, you might remember Satori’s “400” from Revision 2016 or “Locus Alienus” from Riverwash 2016. He is also one of the organisers of Demobit. Both of the coders have their specific style and such a mix seems to work pretty well here.

This demo also features an excellent soundtrack by Chaser. Even if you’re not into this kind of experimental productions, you may still like it just because of its music.

“Esocentrica” can be fully experienced only by running the executable. All the pixel-sized details didn’t survive the compression (which itself adds another layer of glitches), so you’ll be watching a remix of the original demo.

Credits:
Zden – CPU code
Navis – GPU code
Chaser – music
Esocentrica by Andromeda Software Development and Satori on Pouet

#2 – Margin of Error by fresh!mindworkz and Ümlaüt Design

I guess that an allowable margin of error while counting votes was smaller than 15 points, so fresh!mindworkz and Ümlaüt Design had to accept the second place.

What we got here is mostly a big amount of cubes, the favourite 3D object of every demoscene coder. They are nicely synced to Gargaj’s music.

The most interesting part is the last 1/4 of the demo, an effect with destructible cube and God-Rays. This could be a good beginning for a killer demo, but unfortunately, this is where it ends.

Credits:
Aha – code
Pasy – GPU code, visuals
Gargaj – soundtrack
Margin of Error by fresh!mindworkz & Ümlaüt Design on Pouet

#3 – Hlad! by Zahar & Dorcyy

This demo is a result of party-coding and it’s actually the fist one made by Zahar and Dorcyy. It features some simple effects done with Rebels’ demotools and a quite pleasant mix of chillout and two-step (chill-step?) soundtrack.

After watching it I came up with a theory. Most of the sceners are going to the party with a hunger for new demos. If there is not enough productions or the quality is low, you can grab a sausage with a mustard and this should satisfy your hunger anyway.

Credits:
Zahar – music, visuals
Dorcyy – gfx
Aha & Pasy / Rebels – tools
Hlad! by Zahar & Dorcyy on Pouet

#4 – Demobit Trip by Coprocessor

An interesting demo with a concept of Artifical Intelligence developing a demo for Demobit party. Unfortunately (?), it’s unable to do it on its own, so it has to connect to human interfaces. Drone ambient soundtrack by ps gives an impression of being inside a cold server room and fits the story perfectly. Even if it’s a small and possibly fast made production, I really like the idea.

Note: the executable available at the time of writing this has some bug (at least on my PC); not all of the info boxes are shown and the demo ends with the plane hanging above Bratislava. This might lead to a wrong assumption that it’s not finished. You may want to check the archived stream for a proper version. Or, as this is an open-sourced demo, clone its repository and debug it yourself :).

Credits:
Jae686 – code
Zeroshift – code, graphics
ps – music
Demobit Trip by Coprocessor on Pouet

#5 – V2 by Feryx

Unfortunately, not much to say here, it’s a simple one-effect demo with a guitar music. I think this could work as a nice visualisation plugin for Winamp.

There’s no video capture, but you may download the executable and run it on your PC or just take a look at 4 screenshots below.

Credits:
Feryx – Code
V2 by Feryx on Pouet

#6 – Demobit Starter by ArtWaY

Another demo made at the party place and the only one for Amiga with AGA chipset. It’s actually an one-effect demo, with a simple 3D cubes scene and a message from the creators.

As for now, there is no pouet entry for this demo and it’s also not included in the party stuff at scene.org. You can watch it on the archived party stream or just check these 4 screenshots to get an idea how it looks like.

#7 – Not Horse by Sebbert

This is the lowest ranked “demo”, so what you can expect here is 2 minutes of JavaScript displaying random pictures of horses to a happy hardcore chip-tune music.

The demo should begin with a warning for individuals with epilepsy as the pictures moves rapidly. The organisers haven’t used their right to disqualify this one as “endlessly boring” or “by any means disturbing” (general rules of the party compos). While it could have been fun to watch it on a big screen, you probably don’t want to waste your time on this.

Credits:
Sebbert – code
Not Horse by Sebbert on Pouet

Summary

A few decent productions, but also many one-effect or party-coded entries too. But it’s still not bad as for resurrected party, many sceners wanted to support it and they succeeded. Let’s hope that future editions of Demobit party will have even more good releases in the demo compo.

You can re-watch all the competitions on archived stream (almost 12 hours of video from Saturday).

If after watching the demos you fell a bit of insufficiency (like me), there is something else that may be interesting to you. The organisers invited a very solid team of speakers. Check out these seminars:

UPDATE: While doing the final check of the links just before publishing this article, it turned out that the video has been removed. I’m leaving these links for now, in case it will become available again.
UPDATE 2: The recording is online again and all the talks will be available as separate videos soon. Thanks Zden!
UPDATE 3: …and they are ready, thanks!

• Jan ‘Rrřola’ Kadlec – Magic of 256-byte x86 intros
• Michal “Kiero” Wozniak – Making ‘high-end’ Amiga demos. Lessons learned
• Filipe “PS” Cruz – Demoscene & Netaudio
• Daniel “Redox” Sýkora – Helping Charming Hand-Drawn to Survive in Cruel CG
• Kostas “Navis” Pataridis – Now and then: Life in the big ASD machine

I haven’t watched all of them yet, but you can’t go wrong with such a lineup of speakers. Definitely a very strong point of the party. And in case of releases? Well, some of them were really yummy, but the hunger still remains. I think I will look into my fridge now.

Official combined demo compo results